Well i'm alright i suppose. pretty much just been chilling at home kind of looking for work and mostly staying home with the grandparents. My grandma recently got a permanent catheter so thats been fun dealing with. Aside from the usual stressors things have been fine. I've made some new friends recently and i really like this fact. just cuz its nice to have new faces to surround yourself with.
I went camping some time in mid june and had a fantabulous time! Upon my return i went about my usual affairs, added more water to Baxter's (my snake's) humidifier thing and hung out. A day or so later i decided i hadn't held baxter in a while so i opened his cage to find that he was no longer in it. Worried, i looked under my bed, in my closet in my dresser under my futon behind my fridge and inconspicuously in and under my couches. I didn't tell my grandparents or aunt that he had gone missing because i didn't want anyone freaking out, i waited even a few days before telling my sisters. Eventually after a few weeks of quietly searching i kind of gave up. I left his cage as it was on the off chance that I'd find him.
A few days ago i was out and about with some folks and my sister Marilynn calls me and asks me what time i'm coming home. I tell her im not sure and ask why she wanted to know. She tells me she has a present for me, and when i ask why it was imperative that i be home at a specific time she says "it just is" So around ten or so she calls me and asks me when I'm coming home, i was at a friends dinner party so i was a little annoyed and i asked why. She says that the gift she got me (that her boyfriend Scott paid for) was a ball python. So i leave the party a little earlier than i'd have liked and went home to meet this guy.
I guess his name was Raja, but i changed it to Francis.
The story with Francis was that he was owned by a woman with kids and i guess the rest of the family found out about that python that killed that kid a while ago and they all flipped out and made her get rid of it. So she sold it to my sister in a pillowcase for $50 and gave her his little cave that he hides in. I then spent the better part of the next few hours cleaning out Baxter's cage. I cleaned out the old bedding and threw it in the garden, washed his water bowl and the sliding glass doors, i mixed up a solution of water and rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle and sprayed the fake plants really good and set them on top of the washer to dry a lil bit before i rinsed them off. As for the wood pieces, i had to wash them with soap and water, then rinse them off, then i sprayed them with the alcohol solution and rinsed them again, after that i put them in the oven to dry. Once everything was cleaned and taken care of i put everything back in the tank. (one thing i forgot to do was clean the walls of the tank) Once that was all situated i filled the bowl with fresh water and put Francis in his new home. He explored the shit out of it and then hid under the log. I went to bed.
The next day went as normal and i went about business as usual. At one point in the late afternoon Trisha asked if she could borrow my Xbox360 I agreed and unplugged everything from my TV and realized i had kept the box that the 360 had come in. I pulled it out from the bottom of the shelf that the cage sits on. I opened it and got rid of some of the pamphlets and plastic wrappings. i lifted the flaps and low and behold who do i find but a coiled up baxter and his shedding amidst plastic wrappings. So naturally, i'm like...shit now i have two snakes who cannot live together due to species differences. Namely one might have a germ or disease that the other's immune system couldn't handle. So i picked up Baxter who wasn't aggressive, or looking any worse for the wear really, and put him in a pillow case and tied it off and placed it inside one of my empty camera bags for the time being. I left for an outing and came home later that evening and took baxter out again. He was kinda cold so i held him a bit so that he could absorb some of my body heat and warm up a bit. While i was holding him i put the pillow case he was in on top of the cage above the heater so it would be warm when i put him back in. I checked him out and he seemed a little apprehensive at first and kinda defensive but warmed up after a while.
I was worried about what to do with Francis and i was contemplating making a craigslist ad but Scott said he'd buy the shit needed for the snake and keep him (albeit keep him in Marilynn's room). The next day i went out with Scott and we got another cage for Francis to live in. We got everything we needed and put Francis in his new home.
It's definitely not as elaborate as Baxter's house
but since he'd already crawled around on some of Baxter's plants i put them in his tank so he'd have some greenery. I gave Marilynn my old garden sprayer that i used to use for Baxter before i got the humidifier that way she could keep up the humidity in the tank.
I then went through the same process i went through when i set the cage up for Francis, this time i remembered to clean the walls. After everything was dry and clean i put the bedding in and set the cage up for Baxter i turned the heat lamp on and reset the timers for the lights and the humidifier and put Baxter back in his house. I figured i'd wait until he was acclimated to his house again before i should get him food. I think tomorrow i'll pick him up a rat.
